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Fighting Misogyny in Gaming Begins At Home

There are many, many facets to obstacles facing women in gaming. There’s the fact that most big games are still blood and guts fantasies meant to appeal to young men There’s the way female developers are treated within the industry, as if some can’t believe they actually work there (see the whole #1reasonwhy movement we’ve discussed recently). But perhaps most pressingly, it’s how female players are treated when they play the games themselves, or even express an interest in gaming in general.

The reality of being a girl gamer is downright astonishing at times. Something as innocuous as a feminine-sounding gamertag can draw in an inbox full of horrifying messages. Speaking over voicechat and revealing your gender is taken as an invitation for sexual harassment.

The best (well, worst) way to see this in action at the moment would likely be the blog “Fat, Ugly or Slutty.” The name refers to the three most common paths of insults directed from men to women over gaming services, both console and PC. Female gamers take screenshots of the creeps that send them gender-based hate mail. It’s fun to publicly shame the clowns, but it speaks to the fact that the community has a lot of growing up to do.

That’s often a common excuse when this issue is brought up. Many of these harassers are not grown up. Many are young teenage males and therefore the excuse becomes, “well, they’re just being boys, they’ll grow out of it eventually.”

But that’s not it. No matter what age you are, there’s no excuse for behaving in this fashion. As kids, we all usually grow up with some sort of playful “war of the genders.” Boys are gross, girls have cooties, etc. As time goes on however, that changes once sexual maturity begins.

Or at least it's supposed to.

There’s something inherently rotten in society now where young boys are treating girls this way. When I was a pre-teen or teenager (or in the years after, for that matter) I never leveled verbal abuse at a girl in any of the “fat, ugly or slutty” categories. This isn’t “normal behavior” for young males. This is conditioning by society, and apparently being respectful toward women is now something that must be outright taught to these young men.

Many parents will have talks with their sons about girls. Be it the awkward sex talk which has little to do with interpersonal relationships, or giving a shy kid ideas on how to talk to girls. But now it seems that kids need outright lessons in how to respect women. Parents, if they witness this behavior or even hear about it in regards to their children, need to sit them down and explain that isn’t how you treat people, women especially. Some of these offenders may have serious, deep-rooted issues with women in their lives, but most of the younger crowd are just trying to be funny, and that’s something that can be pushed back against. I would even suggest a system that emails the parents of underage players transcripts or recordings of vile language used in game. They need a way to know this is happening in the first place.

It would be remiss to assume that all these insult-spewers are in fact, twelve year old boys. The fact is, this just isn’t true. There are many, many adult men taking part in this kind of behavior. Though that information can’t necessarily be gleaned from Xbox Live messages, it can be from places outside of video games. I’ve seen countless blogs similar to Fat, Ugly or Slutty detailing the kinds of perverted messages females receive on a daily basis on dating sites like OKCupid or PlentyofFish. These aren’t kids, and the older the messager, the more graphic the message most times.

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It literally makes me sick the way men treat women on XBL and other services. I don’t know how anyone think that the horrible things they say and do are funny. It is exhausting trying to correct the behavior online, but I agree that we now have to explicitly teach men, and boys how to behave towards women. What a sad time it is that this has to be taught instead of being known.

Hmm i wonder why your kind is treated so badly by gamers. I want to take a look a the MMO genre for a second here, i promise it relates. When games like World of Warcraft were first created, they were mostly male dominated. Females, trying to “seem like a cool girl to the boys”, started to join in on these games. However they just used things like: “I’m a girl so you must level me up for free” or “I’m a girl so you must give me free stuff”. Over time the male gamers got fed up with this bullshit and whenever a girl gamer would act this way the gamers would snap back with insults, like they were fat, things that usually make girls go away. However girls had already spread like a disease to other games (XBL going back to that) too and had said similar things to try and get a head of male gamers. Female gamers were surprised for some reason when male gamers used similar insulting techniques to get them to go away. Then this stuff caused such a shit storm with femnazis like yourself, and since it’s absolutely hilarious watching people get angry over things they caused, males gamers continued to insult females online so they could get reactions out of femnazis. Then this whole kickstarter thing trying to show that “GAMES ARE TEACHING KIDS TO BE SEXIST, PRINCESS PEACH SHOULD SAVE MARIO (which she did in a game actually)” happened, when the truth was if you want to complain to anyone get a fucking time machine and go back to the middle ages to the people who created epic tales of heros saving damsels in distress, these stories were the inspiration for these games. The best thing you can probably do now is get the femnazi movement out of the games industry and let things cool down, you caused this problem so fix it. Thank you

As always I like your article a lot. Although I feel the need to clarify one thing:

You mentioned “fat, ugly and slutty” as the three most common paths of insults from men directed to women and that there is no excuse for behaving in a fashion like that and I definitely agree with that. However two of these three mentioned paths could also be used against men.

What I want to say is that in my opinion it is not sexist to insult a woman by following one of these paths. The third part, the “slutty” one is only arguably misogynistic.

For example: If I said that all women were sluts it would be misogynistic. But if I insult a certain female by calling her a slut I am not being misogynistic.

Is it nice, or good behavior to insult someone? Of course it is not and I do not want to defend such behavior in any way and you are right to say that parents should watch their childen’s language and talk to them if they recognize that their child frwquently insulty people. I just feel the need to clarify that using gender specific insults is not sexist. This is of course applicable to both sexes. Otherwise a word like “a**hole” would be totally sexist as it is more often used against men than against women.

It still astounds me to this day since this whole pseudo-feminism movement started with that asinine Kickstarter, which by the way has lapsed its deadline months ago, why women are still surprised that video games are marketed towards men when majority of its consumers ARE men. Putting a woman’s online gaming behavioral habits aside, which would otherwise open a whole can o’ worms of arguments/counter-arguments, minorities are always going to be condemned and ostracized–it’s human nature, and it doesn’t help that this movement calls them out for scrutiny. The sooner that ‘girl gamers’ can put this behind them and start acting like normal, sane people, the sooner we can actually start treating them as such.

Women who don’t want to be verbally harassed online aren’t acting like “normal, sane people”? And nearly half of all gamers are women now, so that’s incorrect.

Dismissing complaints about women’s issues in gaming like you’re doing is a huge part of the problem. To act like it’s not an issue is just burying your head in the sand and ignoring reality because it doesn’t affect you directly.

And “Minorities are always going to be condemned and ostracized”? Well gee, they had better just shut up and accept that huh? Ridiculous.

Please cite your source where you found that females made be ‘nearly half’ the core consumer base. I would be more impressed if you included ‘core’ or online-multiplayer statistics and not just anyone who’s played Angry Birds on their cellphone or mobile device.

You seem to take issue of how I’m trying to ‘dismiss’ the situation. What do you want me to do–as a male myself, to jump on my horse and white knight a cause that honestly doesn’t affect me, nor that I can relate to? I do my part to simply not care–if I find that I playing with a female, I just pretend she’s no different than the billions of anonymous people on the internet.

The problem is–MY problem, is when females bring attention to their gender, acting it’s like some achievement that they’re capable of picking up a controller, and is no more obnoxious than the males who vocally ire over it. But in my personal experience, this usually doesn’t happen, whether it’s the types of online multiplayer games I play or the demographics of the crowd I play with, gender usually is remained anonymous.

In fact, in my personal experience, it is the media that is blowing this out of proportion, whole websites that publically support this ‘movement’.

And you know why? Money.

It brings more traffic to their website and, in turn, they get more money from their advertisers.

If you Called-Out my comment just so you can publicly refute and criticize me, you might as well post the entire conversation. Otherwise you’re discrediting yourself as a respectable journalist by cherry-picking comments to respond to in your own article.